Found one bug while screwing around in E11

How to reproduce it:
-bind /entry to some of your F keys
-go to join some server
-while loading track execute /entry via F key
-join again same server
-you are joined, but in lobby screen while track is loading (even though server is already in race); track should be loaded before host join
-and than you suddenly decide to leave server, and puff; lag bar goes up non-stop; LFS is stuck, only way to close it is to kill it via Task Manager

Here is video of bug reproduction

Would have posted some feedback after the E10 patch, but I've just been having too much fun racing - in 30+ years of playing racing games and sims I've never enjoyed driving anything as much as LFS in the Rift . Thanks so much for all the work you've put into the Rift support - it's really paid off m8. Anyway, now that I've managed to tear myself away I do have some more feedback on E11:

1. The aspect ratio correction works really well and is a great feature - with it enabled I've been racing at 1920x1080 rather than 1920x1200, improving FPS at no cost as the black strips at the top and bottom of the screen aren't visible in the Rift.

2. The head and neck modelling also works great -it's a fairly subtle effect if you're not looking for it but it makes head movements feel much more natural.

3. The default settings are pretty good, though I tend to reduce the FOV slightly to 112 degrees and raise the head height so the slider's set around 70-80% to the right as my eyes seem too close to my shoulders at the default position (gauged by looking at my virtual shoulder in the rift then tilting it off my face so I can peak at my real shoulder and comparing the relative distances).



Feature requests

1. It would be really great to have an option to match the rotation of your virtual driver's steering wheel to your real steering wheel rather than the car's. This would be a purely visual change but would greatly increase the immersion for Rift users and improve the illusion of inhabiting your virtual driver's body, an illusion which is currently slightly spoiled when you rotate your real wheel 90 degrees but see your virtual driver rotate the virtual wheel two or three times as much.

2. By adjusting the interface x centre and y scale settings (to 0.17 and 0.80 respectively) and setting the HUD FOV to maximum, HUD distance to minimum and HUD aspect ratio to 16:9 I've been able to position the in-game HUD elements so they no longer clash with most of the cars:

hud01.jpg
hud02.jpg
hud03.jpg

As you can see, the minimap, position and lap info look a bit like they're projected onto a large pane of glass stuck to my right wing mirror so they don't get in the way when looking forward but can easily be seen by glancing to the right out of my side window. The drawback of these settings are that the menus are stretched horizontally wider than I'd like and the flag and split time messages are slightly off-centre, as are the virtual gauges in chase view:

hud04.jpg

IMO these sacrifices are well worth not having the in-game HUD clash with your car in 3D, but they wouldn't be necessary if we could adjust the interface x scale setting to values bigger than 1.0, effectively stretching the HUD horizontally (which would negate the need for moving the interface x centre to the right), and if we could have separate settings for the HUD and the menus (allowing the menus to be drawn with less distortion).

3. Some objects very close to your head like the V-shaped head rest extensions, the roll bars above you, or the cockpit sides in open wheelers are over-aggressively culled:

clip01.jpg
clip02.jpg

Would it be possible to tweak the near plane clipping to eliminate this issue?

Many thanks,
DD

Thinking about Menus and where to put them in 3D space without intersecting pillars or roll cages etc.

Maybe if the menu was projected onto the windscreen like a real HUD would be, with the correction for angle that HUDS have, so it looks like a flat square image but is actually wider at the bottom to cope with perspective.

The same 'plane' could also be used for single seaters - where the windscreen would be is where the menu plane is (with less perspective correction as most are vertical 'deflectors' rather than windscreens.

Just thinking out loud in the hope that my nonsense might kick start a train of thought that DOES actually work. I don't have a Rift, but I want one

Quote from DickDastardly :

1. It would be really great to have an option to match the rotation of your virtual driver's steering wheel to your real steering wheel rather than the car's. This would be a purely visual change but would greatly increase the immersion for Rift users and improve the illusion of inhabiting your virtual driver's body, an illusion which is currently slightly spoiled when you rotate your real wheel 90 degrees but see your virtual driver rotate the virtual wheel two or three times as much.

It depends on the steering wheel you use.

In LFS, each car has it's own steering wheel rotation set - road cars have 720°, GTR's have 540° etc. (full list here). If you have a wheel with an adjustable rotation, like Logitech G25/G27, you need to set the same amount of degrees in the Logitech Profiler to match the rotation in game, or set the wheel turn compensation in LFS to 1.00 and 900° in the profiler. In the latter case, you will not have those "ff stops" on both locks, but you will not have to fiddle around with the rotations every time you change your car (well there is an app which changes those values for you but that's not the point).

If you own a wheel with a fixed rotation, then I'm afraid it's not possible to match your wheel's rotation to that in game. Some wheels have only 360° or so, which means if you take a car with more "real" rotation, you will experience what you described in your post.

I hope I'm right with everything

Quote from Flame CZE :

It depends on the steering wheel you use.

In LFS, each car has it's own steering wheel rotation set - road cars have 720°, GTR's have 540° etc. (full list here). If you have a wheel with an adjustable rotation, like Logitech G25/G27, you need to set the same amount of degrees in the Logitech Profiler to match the rotation in game, or set the wheel turn compensation in LFS to 1.00 and 900° in the profiler. In the latter case, you will not have those "ff stops" on both locks, but you will not have to fiddle around with the rotations every time you change your car (well there is an app which changes those values for you but that's not the point).

If you own a wheel with a fixed rotation, then I'm afraid it's not possible to match your wheel's rotation to that in game. Some wheels have only 360° or so, which means if you take a car with more "real" rotation, you will experience what you described in your post.

I hope I'm right with everything

Unfortunately my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback wheel doesn't have adjustable rotation, but hopefully it would be a fairly easy change for Scawen to add an option to match the visual rotation in-game to the player's wheel (without any change to handling etc).
Cheers,
DD

from the mages posted above eg this one
http://www.mikesteven.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/rift/hud01.jpg
i think the hud elements at the side should be rotated towards you in such a way that the hud element is projected onto a 2d plane segment tangential to a sphere round your head position

maybe the best final solution would be to do something similar to what assetto corsa does with its hud elements that can be dragged and dropped by mouse with some additional buttons for each hud element that allow you to rotate them in 3d and drag it along the distance

Quote from tristancliffe :

Maybe if the menu was projected onto the windscreen like a real HUD would be, with the correction for angle that HUDS have, so it looks like a flat square image but is actually wider at the bottom to cope with perspective.

The same 'plane' could also be used for single seaters - where the windscreen would be is where the menu plane is (with less perspective correction as most are vertical 'deflectors' rather than windscreens.

Just thinking out loud in the hope that my nonsense might kick start a train of thought that DOES actually work. I don't have a Rift, but I want one

a proper hud to my knowledge is actually projected to distance "infinity" so your eyes dont have to change focus between the real world and the hud
infinity being >9m ie the distance where your eyes lens is focused at infinity and where the distance between your eyes becomes too small to create a 3d image (beyond 6-9m your brain creats the 3d image from effects other than eye distance to my knowledge)

im not sure how to recreate the effect of parallel images coming from a plane near your head with 3d rendering though especially in a car where the background image might not necesarily be always more than 9m away from you

Quote from DickDastardly :

Unfortunately my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback wheel doesn't have adjustable rotation, but hopefully it would be a fairly easy change for Scawen to add an option to match the visual rotation in-game to the player's wheel (without any change to handling etc).
Cheers,
DD

the problem there is with a wheel that has less rotation available than the in game wheel you need the compensation inside the game which is basically some sort of exponential (or some other curve) mapping between your inputs and the in game outputs
the reason why youd want to see the "real" in game wheel angle is because with that mapping fucntion its not immediately obvious how much youre actually turning the wheel without that visual feedback of how much the in game wheel has turned

Some more about that /entry

-execute /entry right before you actually join server
-you are at entry screen, but you are also on server
-once you click multiplayer, you are on server (only); no cars can be seen until select TCP

VIDEO

Upgraded to e11. Is amazing, thanks. Improved my driving somehow. Won a couple of fbmw races where I was losing them all before. The view has given me a better feel of the car I'm in to the point I can properly correct oversteer. Kudos, the game just got even more immersive.

Some quick notes:

Bug: suspension view in the box is totally corrupt in the rift.

Future improvement suggestion:
It´s seems that the headtracking isn´t recorded when watching the replay. It would be nice to see the real headmovements there.
Especially when racing online (havent´t tested yet), so it would be possible to see where a driver is looking at.
In this way it would also be possible to communicate with each other in a non verbal way -> e.g. head gestures "yes" or "Nooooooooooooo"

Quote from Rift_Racing_1 :

Kudos, the game just got even more immersive.

I second this!

Quote from just2fast :

Some quick notes:

Bug: suspension view in the box is totally corrupt in the rift.

Future improvement suggestion:
It´s seems that the headtracking isn´t recorded when watching the replay. It would be nice to see the real headmovements there.
Especially when racing online (havent´t tested yet), so it would be possible to see where a driver is looking at.

Yeah, this is something I noticed years ago, the head only rotates (or whatever the word should be) 45º & 90º, it would be cool to record a lot more positions, so you could see where people with TrackIR and Rift look at.

Quote from Whiskey :

Yeah, this is something I noticed years ago, the head only rotates (or whatever the word should be) 45º & 90º, it would be cool to record a lot more positions, so you could see where people with TrackIR and Rift look at.

Would be cool, but first it need some kind of moves smoothing. No thanks if it will be laggy as wheel movements. Easy way to do it is to send position as well as speed of movement or simply smooth moves between current and next position.

A while ago I did some test about wheel smoothing, draw with GDI wheel in my program and use LFS data to control its rotation. When position in LFS changed, I didn't simply move it but rotated it slowly to match LFS position when next wheel position update arrive, it was way smoother, but probably still will need some adjustments for LFS.

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :

Would be cool, but first it need some kind of moves smoothing. No thanks if it will be laggy as wheel movements.

I really don't know if I agree or I don't haha

If the deal was crappy move with the promise of an smooth version some motnhs later I would want that for sure. If we were never to get the cool version I guess I'd still want it (afterall there can't be that many people affected by this, right?), but I also agree that it won't look specially good.

Quote from just2fast :

Future improvement suggestion:
It´s seems that the headtracking isn´t recorded when watching the replay. It would be nice to see the real headmovements there.
Especially when racing online (havent´t tested yet), so it would be possible to see where a driver is looking at.
In this way it would also be possible to communicate with each other in a non verbal way -> e.g. head gestures "yes" or "Nooooooooooooo"

That would be amazing!

Indeed. That would be really awesome.

Quote from MousemanLV :

Indeed. That would be really awesome.

Sharing head movements - interesting idea.
I was initially thinking that doing it with enough time resolution to be smooth would be pretty difficult and that we'd basically have NO chance of getting it any time soon.

But... then I realised that this is very different from the car position & control updates (which often have very poor resolution - e.g. 3 times per second).

Head movements don't affect the car position, so latency isn't such an issue. I suspect it would work just fine if (say) a second's worth of updates got stuffed into one packet... And I *think* this would make it somewhat less demanding. So we could achieve something like 10 head position updates per second without much network traffic (IIRC, the short packets are dominated by packet header), as long as we're prepared to tolerate a short delay...

Well, indirectly LFS already has a certain amount of "head motion" packets as look left/right is transmitted accordingly to the client when in an MP race (and this transfers to the MPR as well).

Virtual head movement via tracking already works with TrackIR, propably with the Rift too. It just needs more resolution, as the virtual head currently only moves in two steps and in horizontal axis only.

I've not dissected the network packs, so I have no idea of how head movements are sent to the client, but as I see it right now, they have 3 states, Left, Right and Center. That's 2 bits at least. If you bump that up to a whole byte (8 bits) you can get 256 different values. If you use that for just X, that's plenty of room for a fairly good amount fluidity. Or you could use 4 bits (upper nibble) for X, and the 4 lower bits (lower nibble) for Y, giving you 8 states that you can kinda tween between. The nibble with tween idea might make more sense given the expected number of packets a second for updates (3 - 6 Packets Per Second).

Quote from Dygear :

they have 3 states, Left, Right and Center.

Just to correct - actually they have 5 states - 2 to each side (when you press W for looking left,you can also additionally press E to turn view even more and other way round) and center. I believe looking to rear (by pressing R) is not animated,would be unrealistic to see someone's head turned 180° anyway.

Oh yes, I forgot about the in between states. I gues that means 4 bits then! 1000 for far left, 0100 for mid left, 0000 for center, 0010 for mid right, and 0001 for far right.

Quote from Dygear :

Oh yes, I forgot about the in between states. I gues that means 4 bits then! 1000 for far left, 0100 for mid left, 0000 for center, 0010 for mid right, and 0001 for far right.

It can also be like this:

110 far left, 010 left, 000 center, 001 right, 101 far right

This probably isn't that logical to work with, but I prove it can be done with just 3 bits.

On older patches it had the animation to looking behind, since it was 0º - 90º - 180º, not 0º - 45º - 90º like it's today, but since it didn't had the 45º, it was also only 5 stages:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9meSjjwNFM


(the first is patch X, the second is patch E)

Quote from Specht77 :

On older patches it had the animation to looking behind, since it was 0º - 90º - 180º, not 0º - 45º - 90º like it's today, but since it didn't had the 45º, it was also only 5 stages:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9meSjjwNFM
(the first is patch X, the second is patch E)

Nice vid
However, it looks to me that the first one shows 0, +/-45, +/-90º, and the second shows roughly 0, +/-30, +/-60º.
I'm old enough for 90º to hurt so the second is more realistic for me
Neither video goes anywhere near 180º (looking backwards) so I'm possibly confused about what you mean.

In any case, 8 bits is indeed waaayyy more than we need for horizontal movement - I agree that 4 would be enough (that allows 16 positions, e.g. 7 left, 7 right, centre), and indeed the rendering could easily smooth the transitions between them at display-time. Vertical motion might be worth adding, not sure about that.

I doubt that Scawen will see this as a priority though

I mean that in first person, your screen will turn 90º then 180º (patch X), or 45º then 90º (patch E) when pressing E then E + W

but your head ingame will turn what it turns on this video